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From My Window

C. K. Williams

Issue 81, Fall 1981

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrivesfrom somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded—I hadn’t even noticed—and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.A girl in a gymsuit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine, and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the blockand the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me, their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.I know whete they’re going—to the “Legion;” once, when I was putting something out, they stopped,both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn’t ten o’clock—and we chatted for a bit.I don’t know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder if they’re lovers.They don’t look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along,contriving as they reach beneath me to dip a wheel ftom the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters,tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat,his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down, to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.In the storefront office on the corner. Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show:gazing through the golden letters of their name, they’re not, at least, thank god, laughing.Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.Now he has to lift the other one, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair but a dangling footcatches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down, set the chair to rights and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs; under the thick white coils of belly blubber the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair,then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be.and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he’d knownall along that I was watching and I can’t help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold,and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles then realized made a figure eight,what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he’d blazed but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away,up across the skeletal trees to the tall center-city buildings, some, though it was midnight,with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning- beacons signalling erraticallyagainst the thickening flakes, their smouldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.In the morning, nothing; every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white, its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.